"Can't we all just get along?" -Rodney King

I wrote about the new Schema.org guidelines here, in an article that I referenced from SearchEngineWatch.

Overall I love the idea of using microdata so that search engines can more easily tell what your content is about.  Using the correct tags to identify information on your web pages creates a more robust search experience for the end user of the search engine.  Frankly, this is long overdue, just try to find relevant data on your average search query, it's sometimes a garbled mess.  Bing's television commercials accurately represent runaway querys.

With this in mind I coded a few simple things on our homepage to be Schema.org friendly.  I figured that a simple thing like inserting address, postal code and phone number microdata would be a great place to start.

Overall it was relatively easy to do but in the future I hope that somone creates a Joomla! (and Wordpress) plugin that will make our lives easier.

After correctly formatting and inserting the code I figured that I would do a quick test using the HTML validator over at W3C.

Listen, I get that NOT EVERYONE is as anal with W3C compliance as I am, but the thing that struck me (after finding 5 errors on the page) was the errors on the page are directly attributed to the microdata that Schema.org is asking for.

Here's one of the errors that I'm getting:

"itemscope" is not a member of a group specified for any attribute

This represents a problem in the webmaster community, often folks come up with great ideas and they don't take time to address the appropriate people regarding compliance issues.

Being W3C compliant is not really a badge of honor, it's just something that I believe in so that screen readers and visually impaired folks can easily read or listen to what we put online.  Sometimes it's a hassle but overall if I can make someones live better, why not make the effort and do the extra work?

Sometimes it's like herding cats when you try to get things done...

If you are into seo, pay-per-click, or internet marketing I want to encourage you to add SearchEngineWatch.com to your daily reading routine.  They have great articles that will truly benefit your online business if you take time to listen to what the authors of the articles are saying, consider how you can create a plan of action for your own sites, and then take action.  

It's like the New York Times for nerds. :-)

I ran across a great article by Eric Enge that gives a case study on how cleaning up the coding of an existing webstie helped one of his customers increase the traffic to their site by 40%.  It's a great example of simple things that you can do to your website that have huge results.

Over time, websites decay, links get broken, images get moved, reference links no longer work, it's just the way it goes over time.  After awhile your site starts to look like a house that has been weathered and a neglected.  In order to keep your 'virtual real estate' looking like a million dollars, it's a good habit to analyze it once in awile to ensure that your links aren't busted and your content is still relevant.

I could yammer on for hours about this but in my opinion, results speak louder than words:

Check out the full article by clicking here.

While most of know Google as the mega search engine it is, many people are not aware of the fact, they also supply a bounty of free website developer tools that anybody can use. Some of these are on the cutting edge in the industry, and below you find a few of their more prominent ones.

Google Code – This site provides a wide array of API’s, code snippets, and other tools that most website developers will find useful. It also has video tutorials, as well as news and upcoming events that anybody who builds a website could benefit from.

Google Web Toolkit – At this site you will find plug-ins, libraries filled with code, interface design components, and other various tools that can be utilized to improve any website.

Google App Engine – If you have ever wondered if you could run your app’s using Google’s own enterprise hardware, well you can, if you go to this site.

The computer is no longer king, reported one Adobe executive. It used to be that when it came to designing and developing platforms for digital content, you first concentrated on the computer, and everything else was secondary.

That is not the case anymore, with the ever increasing use of smart phones and tablets by the general public. Richard Galvin, the Adobe product manager for Flash, said “they have had to rapidly switch their priorities to meet people’s buying habits, and the computer is no longer the number one choice anymore.

In fact, Microsoft has reported two consecutive quarters of declining sales and profits for their Windows operating system. A company executive placed the blame for the declining numbers clearly on the increase in popularity of smart phones and tablets.

The Window’s operating system has been challenged previously, but those contenders, always eventually turned into pretenders. Although it is still too early to tell, it certainly does look like the smart phone and tablet will be formable competitors for the computer, at least in the short-term.